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I taught science in middle and high school, so I have suffered through some painful partner and team presentations. When the work isn’t equally distributed between partners, it shows in the presentation. Even the other students can tell when a lazy presenter tries to pull numbers or facts from his underpants. Sometimes one of the presenters has the gift of meaningless gab and will filibuster for a while to run out the clock. Often, this same person will have done none of the work.
The Oval Office press gaggle put on by Donald Trump and Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore on August 7th featured Moore as the diligent plucker of data from his underpants and Trump as the guy who hasn’t done the homework, knows nothing, but has a lot to say. If you watched their dog-and-pony show [ [link removed] ], you probably came away with the uneasy feeling that the numbers presented and the conclusions drawn were a bunch of bunk, and you were right.
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Paul Krugman wrote a piece [ [link removed] ] about the presentation and even included a spelling joke:
First, look at the chart. The second line claims that it shows “medium income” — a term unknown to economics. Clearly it was supposed to say median income.
OK, speling misteaks hapen. But not, usually, in charts prepared for a presentation by the President of the United States.
Beyond that, Jared Bernstein, who has looked at the data Moore presented in that chart and others, says that the numbers appear to be all wrong. Which is no surprise given the source.
Krugman’s piece is mostly about what a hack Stephen Moore is as an economist and how Hannah Arendt had predicted the rise of such hacks. I was curious about where Moore got some of his numbers. He couldn’t have pulled ALL of them out of thin underwear. So, I followed the link to Jared Bernstein’s post [ [link removed] ] where he said this:
I have no idea how Moore got the numbers he used and there’s no methods listed. I checked the Motio Research real median household income series and thought it went up about half of what Moore said for this year. His BLS chart seemed to add the initial revision to the final revision which makes no sense, but I can’t believe he would do that so maybe there’s a better explanation.
But that’s all the seconds of my life I will devote to fact-checking this work, which is clearly designed to entertain the president, not to help us understand the actual economy.
Clearly, I would have to dig a little to come up with some plausible but misused sources. The chart Krugman refers to, which is shown at the top of his post, is wildly out of context. The median real income in Trump’s first four years rose 6.95%. Over the previous four years, it had increased by 10.17%. Obama’s first four years looked a lot like Biden’s four years because both of them were handed an economy in crisis. My guess is that the next president will find herself in the same situation.
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I, like Jared Bernstein, have no idea how Moore got the numbers he used, so I can only assume he underpantsed them. I’m no economist, but I can usually figure these things out with a little research and math. And believe me, I tried. I do take some consolation in the fact that Stephen Moore said one of his sources was mysterious Census Bureau data that hadn’t yet been released. That is the Canadian girlfriend of economic data.
Krugman’s piece makes pretty clear that Moore has a very loose association with the truth and with the rigor one would expect from an economic adviser to the President of the United States.
The BLS chart Jared Bernstein mentioned was a little easier to decode, and it makes Stephen Moore look even worse.
The first problem here is the 855,000 benchmark revision. The actual benchmark revision was -589,000 [ [link removed] ]:
Moore seems to have used the preliminary benchmark revision, which is weird considering that the final revision has been out for quite some time. Also, he got the number wrong [ [link removed] ]:
How -818,000 got changed to -855,000 is another mystery. I’m not sure if it’s an underpants thing or a misplaced-my-reading-glasses thing. It is definitely not a thing that should be displayed in the Oval Office. Also, the benchmark revisions incorporate monthly revisions, so adding the two together to arrive at a total is counting the same thing twice. At least Moore successfully added the two numbers together to arrive at his final figures.
Moore and Trump were trying to insinuate two things: that BLS data is unreliable and that revisions were partisan. They ignored positive revisions from Biden’s first two years in office and that the BLS cumulatively underestimated job growth during the Biden Administration by 1,237,000 [ [link removed] ] jobs. Also, that -818,000 revision was released in late August of 2024, so it certainly didn’t help Kamala Harris. Trump claimed that the revision didn’t happen until after the election—just another in a long string of verifiable lies.
My biggest takeaway from writing this is that it’s awfully easy to put together a misleading presentation, even without resorting to girlfriend-in-Canada sources. Debunking that presentation takes a lot of work. I like research, but finding and digging through BLS and other economic data was a slog for me. Maybe you will enjoy it. Follow a couple of the links and let me know how it goes. Or just believe me. I live close to Canada, but I’m no one’s Canadian boyfriend.
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